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Gaming Nexus Interview with Brad Wardell

Gaming Nexus had the opportunity to sit down with Stardock’s Brad Wardell to talk about the upcoming release of Elemental: War of Magic. The deep amount of character customization feels like something out of a big fantasy RPG, instead of a strategy game. Can you explain how character building influences the rest of the game? Well in most strategy games it’s about your kingdom or your empire or your civilization, but Elemental is about you. The first question you’r... [read more]

Dev Journal

Last day in CA

Today’s my last day in California. In the next few days, the previews should start showing up at which point I’ll be free to tell you about the fairly massive changes to the game between Beta 4 (the public build) and Beta 5 (current build) as well as what’s coming up for release. The high level changes are: The finalized Game UI The finalized Empire Tree (ala Sins of a Solar Empire) Finalized City and Unit UI Finalized Tactical Battle UI Finalized F... [read more]

Dev Journal

Elemental Modding: Part 2 – New Factions

During the early betas of Elemental, we let users creation their own factions during the game setup. But over time, we kept getting more and more good ideas on how to make this more sophisticated that it became impractical to foist such a complex system onto the player (the UI would just get crazy). Moreover, having to UI drive faction creation was resulting in factions that were more or less the same. So we moved this into the area of modding. Let’s create a new faction. I’m going to ... [read more]

Dev Journal

Elemental Modding: Part 1 – The Basics

The first thing to understand about Elemental is that almost everything is put into the DATA directory of Elemental (in program files\stardock\elemental. By contrast, things you mod should go into the documents\my games\elemental\units directory in general (eventually we’ll just put a general mods directory). Inside the Data folder is the English directory. As its name implies, we switch this directory based on localization (so there will eventually be a German, French, Spanish, Italia... [read more]

Dev Journal

LA Bound

Paul Boyer and I are on our way to LA to demo the near final version of Elemental. G4’s Xplay is our first stop. It’ll be the first time that the finalized UI system starts to get shown. Wish us luck! [read more]

News

GameZone’s Elemental Preview

GameZone has posted their preview of Elemental: War of Magic.  This is a great overview of the game, along with some quotes from Stardock’s Brad Wardell. “There are a lot of things you can say about Elemental: War of Magic. But the most important thing might have come from Brad Wardell, the President and CEO of Stardock, and the Executive Producer of the game. “In most [strategy] games, it’s really about your empire, your kingdom, your civilization,” he said. “In Elemental, it’s a... [read more]